Brian Eno left in July. By September the band were in the studio without him, and by November they had the number one album in Britain — the first of their career. That is the whole argument about Roxy Music settled in four months. Stranded is the record that proved Bryan Ferry had been right all along, and the strangest part of the story is who agrees: ask Brian Eno which Roxy Music album is the best, and he says this one.

The short version

Stranded is the third Roxy Music album, released in November 1973 by Island in Britain and, the following April, by Atco in America. It was recorded at AIR Studios in London in September 1973, produced by Chris Thomas and engineered by John Punter. The line-up is Bryan Ferry on vocals and piano, Andy Mackay on saxophone and oboe, Phil Manzanera on guitar, Paul Thompson on drums and timpani, and the newly arrived Eddie Jobson on violin, synthesiser and keyboards, with John Gustafson on bass. Eight tracks, forty-one minutes. It went to number one in Britain and did nothing whatever in America, where it stalled at a hundred and eighty-six. It is also the first Roxy album on which Bryan Ferry is not the only credited songwriter.

The replacement

The rest of the band learned that Eno had gone when they turned up at the studio and found Eddie Jobson standing there instead. He was eighteen, he had just come out of Curved Air, and where Eno had brought chaos he brought a conservatoire training, a violin and an entirely different idea of what a synthesiser was for. It could have been a disaster. What happened instead is that Roxy Music combed the dissonance out of their sound and discovered they still had one. Ferry was in full command for the first time — and, with a certain irony, immediately relaxed his grip on the songwriting, letting Manzanera co-write Amazona and Mackay co-write A Song for Europe. Chris Thomas, who had mixed Abbey Road for the Beatles and would later produce Never Mind the Bollocks for the Sex Pistols, made the whole thing sound clean and enormous. Behind them all sat John Gustafson, first of three albums as the bassist Roxy never quite admitted to having: a Liverpudlian veteran of the Big Three and Quatermass, credited on the records, replaced by somebody else on every tour.

The sound

Less experimental and no less adventurous, which is the trick nobody expected them to pull off. The tape effects and the sci-fi squall left with Eno; in their place came piano, heavier guitar, Jobson’s strings, and a widescreen production that turns the band’s decadence into something close to cinema. Manzanera is the biggest beneficiary, finally audible, layering guitar parts that had previously been buried under electronics. Mackay’s oboe now carries whole songs. Thompson is monumental. And Ferry, running a solo career in parallel by this point, sings with a tortured glamour that is fully formed here for the first time — a crooner who has read too much and slept too little. The unsettling quality survives the loss of the saboteur. It just gets better dressed.

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The songs

Street Life opens with a burst of city noise, and the story behind it is perfect Roxy. They tried dangling a microphone out of the studio window to capture the real thing, got nothing usable, and dubbed in a recording of a Moroccan market instead. Jobson’s synthesiser then out-honks any actual car, Thompson detonates one of his signature breaks, and the band arrives like a vehicle taking a corner too fast. It went to number nine. Just Like You is the gentle one. Amazona is Manzanera’s, sinister and riff-driven — and that riff has had an afterlife nobody could have predicted, sampled by Ice-T in 1993 and then by Jay-Z and Kanye West on Otis in 2011. Psalm runs eight minutes with a harmonium, a slow build and the London Welsh Male Choir, and it is either the most sincere thing Ferry ever recorded or the most elaborate joke; the beauty of it is that you cannot tell. Serenade is brisk. A Song for Europe is the album’s heart: melodrama of the highest order, Mackay’s music, Ferry sinking into French by the final verse, and a song so completely itself that Fassbinder built a scene of his own around it. Mother of Pearl is two pieces welded together — a headlong, shouting descent, then a long, marimba-lit clarity — with Gustafson’s bass acting as a second voice, and many people will tell you it is the best thing the band ever did. Sunset closes at the piano, with Chris Laurence on standing bass, in an exhausted glow.

Reception and legacy

Number one, seventeen weeks in the top seventy-five, and reviews in which Eno’s departure was mentioned everywhere and mourned nowhere. America stayed away entirely, which would remain the pattern for years. Since then, Stranded has become the connoisseur’s choice: the album people name when they want to signal that they know the catalogue rather than the hits. It is the first of the three Jobson records, the point where the band stopped being an art-school experiment and became a working machine that could still frighten people. The sleeve fits the theme, though not the way it looks. Karl Stoecker photographed the model Marilyn Cole on a jungle log — in a tiny studio off the Edgware Road, hair sprayed gold, mist machine running, in a red dress that the stylist Antony Price cheerfully tore to pieces while she was having her make-up done. She had never heard of Roxy Music. And the last word belongs to the man who was not there: Brian Eno has named Stranded his favourite Roxy Music album.

The verdict

Along with the debut and For Your Pleasure, one of the three essential Roxy Music records, and the one that improves most with repeated listening. A Song for Europe and Mother of Pearl are the summit of Ferry’s writing; Street Life is the great single; Psalm is the strangest eight minutes in their catalogue. If the first two albums are Roxy Music as a rumour, this is Roxy Music as a fact. It is not progressive rock, but it is the work of a band who came out of that world, took its ambition, threw away its sincerity, and made something no less serious. Start with the debut. Finish here.

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